Miyuki Nakajima

For Westerners, the singer/songwriter Miyuki Nakajima can be described is the female Japanese equivalent of Bob Dylan -- she's a bit younger than Dylan, and her guitar-based, intelligent, and wordy folk songs are heavier on melancholy than social issues, but she's also enjoyed a long career and plays a similarly important role for Japanese popular music and the country's modern culture in general: suffice to say, she's the only musician to be included in the National Language Council of Japan in the ‘90s. She's not just acclaimed, but commercially successful, too: most of her ...